“Kaleidoscopic Nightmares”

(Author Russell Wangersky in conversation with Mark Forsythe)

As the audience was standing to leave following Burning Down the House the woman in front of me said, "I've been to eight events. This was the most riveting."

Of the 26 writers I've enjoyed over the past week at seven events, Russell Wangersky is one who also stands out for me. The Festival and moderator Mark Forsythe have a good thing going with these slightly offbeat Sunday events at the intimate PTC Studio—offbeat in the sense that the books are not overtly literary, and aren't intended to attract the same audience as, say, the latest Michael Ondaatje novel. Last year it was Tim Bowling and The Lost Coast, his elegiac memoir of growing up in a fishing family on the Fraser River. This year it was Wangersky, the editor of Newfoundland's daily newspaper The Telegram and a former volunteer firefighter, and his mesmerizing descriptions of life narrowing to the fine point of a critical incident—before opening out into the multi-layered difficulties of the aftermath. I hope the Festival continues these types of events because they add texture to the Festival as a whole, and provide exposure for good writing that happens to be coming from a slightly different direction than one might expect at a literary festival.

Wangersky read two passages from Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself, which draws from his time spent responding to fires, motor vehicle accidents, medical emergencies, and other calamities, first in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and then in Portugal Cove-St. Philips, Newfoundland. The writing has a sharp, heightened quality that appeals to all the senses, recreating for the audience the strange, adrenaline-fueled, addictive perceptions that Wangersky experienced in the immediate aftermath of responding to an emergency incident. The writing is equally powerful when it's meditative, and one of Wangersky's achievements is the way his language moves gracefully between action and thought. Wangersky isn't a firefighter who happened to write a book. He's a writer who happened to be a firefighter.

Wangersky also discussed his ongoing emotional and psychological response to what he's witnessed and been involved in. Toward the end of the discussion, he confirmed what I'd been beginning to wonder, that he's probably suffering some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder, although he hasn't been officially diagnosed with the condition. "I'll have nightmares tonight," he said. Writing Burning Down the House hasn't purged him of dark thoughts, and although it has helped in various ways, reading passages from the book, and discussing it, often reactivates the memories. I wobbled over the title for this blog entry, but they're Wangersky's own words—his succinct and apt description of the incredible scene that can await a first responder to a head-on collision, the massive impact doing things to vehicles and occupants that could never be achieved by a film stunt, the results are sometimes so surreal.

During the Q&A an interesting exchange took place between Wangersky and a 31-year Vancouver fire captain, who was in the audience. The captain said, "You're not cut out for it. You're too deep a thinker." Wangersky agreed. The captain also said he appreciated Wangersky's honesty. In the male-dominated world of firefighting, stress and depression weren't always well understood or acknowledged, and listening to Wangersky and the Vancouver captain, one gets the sense they may still be perceived as evidence of weakness rather than as a normal human response.

I wasn't cut out for it either. I spent two and a half years as a police and fire dispatcher in a small town in Ontario, working closely with the police officers, and dispatching four volunteer fire departments. The tightly focused moments during a critical incident, the boozy, off-hours socializing with co-workers, the black humour, the zombie-brain after three days of 12-hour night shifts, the job seeping into the personal life, are all things I know. Now that I'm well away from that life, I'm looking forward to reading about Wangersky's difficult journey.